I have a 160GB SSD and 8GB of RAM. I don't expect to need swap much while my computer is on, but I would like to be able to hibernate. Is there any reason to have a swap partition larger than 8GB? Maybe 8.5GB?

You should be OK setting it = to your amount of RAM to be able to hibernate.

Also you could alter the swappiness. For more details:

https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php..._Space_on_SSDs

I only use between 2gb and half the amount of ram for swap space on all my servers any more... It all really depends on what the server/machine is going to be doing.

Some feel one should not use swap on a ssd but since you desire hibernation, I'd think it unlikely you'd need 8G. My thinking would be it would be faster to power on than it would be to resume from hibernate. At least my VM's are that way.

You are missing an important advantage of hibernation. You can work from exactly that point on from where you hibernated the machine, all application windows are in the same place with the same content and doing things they were doing. This is simply not possible with a normal boot, AFAIK. Regarding the speed, my SSD reads (according to hdparm) with ca. 250MB/s, so reading 8GB would only require 24 seconds, add the kernel boot time and you may come to ca. 30-35 seconds for that. Now do a normal boot and then open all your applications to the point they were before the reboot, you will most likely spend much more time on that.

By the way, on my VMs I normally use neither hibernate nor shutdown, but the suspend option of Virtualbox (when i think about that it should be somewhat similar to hibernation).

Then the OP ought to test his SSD both ways. It may be that his thinking of the old hard drive and new ssd needs to be changed. He may feel he needs hibernate for speed. As you say it may be a point in time deal.

I suggest that you make the 16 GB Swap. Well, you have a lot of space anyway... Beside, Linux binaries mostly requires small amount of space, so this shouldn't be a concern.

With that much RAM and an SSD disk (limited number of writes), I would NOT make a swap partition.

Which will not allow you hibernation. The OP does want his computer to hibernate.

If you want hibernate, then 8 GB.